Middle East (IRC Report)

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, for his excellent chairmanship of the International Relations Committee. I am a member of the committee, so I declare an interest. I was there, making a nuisance of myself, at the start when the advisers and clerks were saying that we were going to do a report on the Middle East. Some of us were a little bit truculent about this and said, “It is simply too big: how on earth can we manage to do a report on the Middle East?”. We were politely reminded by our excellent adviser that she had sent around an idea for the group’s remit. It was going to be about Saudi and Iran, not every possible aspect of the Middle East. That may have been slightly overshadowed in today’s debate, and I will talk a little bit more about some of the other issues. The committee’s starting point was to think about two key players—Saudi and Iran—and to think about the Middle East in a slightly different way, moving on beyond the question of Israel and Palestine, which we could have spent all our evidence sessions looking at.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, mentioned, the work of the committee had a bit of a focus on Brexit. In part, this was because when our new committee was set up last year, just before the referendum, there was a question about what our role was going to be. The quite natural assumption was that we should be thinking about the wider world beyond the European Union. We clearly had no interest in trampling on the toes of the excellent EU Committee and its sub-committees. We had our first meeting, then there was the referendum and at our subsequent meeting we began to say that, as the UK had voted to leave the European Union, our committee might be of increasing importance in thinking about the United Kingdom’s role in the world post Brexit. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, mentioned, there were questions about Brexit and I was the person typically deputed to ask these. There was nothing calculating about the questions nor, I hope, the answers. They were intended to elicit from evidence-givers objective ideas about the impact of Brexit on the UK’s role in the Middle East and the wider world. Would it lead to enhanced opportunities, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is suggesting, or could there be complications? Brexit will suddenly change the nature of the UK’s engagement globally, but it will also change the nature of the UK’s relations with the Middle East, precisely because so much of our activity is, and can be expected to be, with our present European partners.

We started off with the idea of a relatively narrowly defined inquiry, looking at Saudi and Iran and the relations between them. However, we had already heard the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, talking about proxy wars; there were already ideas that we were going to go well beyond just those two countries. The themes we were particularly looking at, and on which I will focus, were: the background context of the Middle East; human rights; arms sales; and, in particular, the changing demographics and educational opportunities in the region. I am not going to get into the nitty-gritty of every possible conflict in the Middle East. Otherwise, I will be winding up at 10 pm tonight and, as I am meant to be speaking in the next debate, that is probably not a good idea.

The issue is how the UK can think about its role in the Middle East. Was the committee going to write a report that a think tank could have done, simply saying, “Here are a set of challenges in the Middle East. Isn’t this terribly difficult and complicated, and can we come up with some possible solutions?”. The committee needed to think through what role the United Kingdom has played, what role it can play and how that role is viewed in the Middle East.

It was for that reason, in part, that we had the round tables with young people that the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, mentioned. They were very much intended as a way of eliciting ideas from a different group of people. It was not as wide and open as it might have been. We did not go to the countries concerned and find ordinary citizens. We did not go to the villages, and we certainly did not go to any refugee camps and talk to people on the ground. So we cannot claim that we have been able to talk to ordinary individuals. Almost by definition, the students who are studying in the United Kingdom are some of the brightest and most privileged of the people coming from the Middle East. Nevertheless, they at least gave a different perspective. They also gave a different demographic perspective, because they were all under 35 and some were in their early 20s. Therefore, it was quite different from simply taking evidence from experts, many of whom, as has already been pointed out, tend to be ambassadors or retired ambassadors, who may be very erudite and expert but whose views will not necessarily accord with young people’s understanding of the problems in the region.

The insights from the young people were of interest, but in particular, as the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, touched on, for many of the young people the key issue was not democracy, as many of us might have expected, but stability. They were not saying, “Please liberate us and deliver us to a democratic system”, but rather, “Actually, we want stability”. However, they also want opportunities. They want to be networked, and many of them are, but they also want the opportunities offered by education.

Our report, like so many reports in the last year, urged the Government to think again about how they view international students. At this point I declare my interest as an employee of Cambridge University, where in part I co-direct a master’s in international relations, and where we have students from the Middle East writing about their region and certainly coming to, and studying in, the UK. This is one area where the United Kingdom could play a major role. The soft power that we see does not come just from the BBC or the British Council; it also comes through the export of higher education, and that means students coming to this country. It was deeply disappointing that the Government’s response to our committee report in many ways tried to answer the questions we had raised but on the issue of international students simply rehearsed the same answers we have heard again and again. Therefore, I yet again ask the Minister to ask his colleague the Home Secretary, and in particular their line manager the Prime Minister, whether they could begin to think about the importance of higher education and international students, because it would deal with one of the issues that is so intractable for them—immigration. I ask them to think again about that.

My committee colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, talked about Yemen, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cox, spoke movingly about Syria, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, talked about ISIS. In doing so, they raised two other issues of fundamental importance. One is the issue of human rights. We talk about human rights, and there is a lot of rhetoric about supporting democracy and human rights—we tend to put those things together. And then there is the question of what the United Kingdom is doing, the extent to which we bother at all to respond to those issues and how we deal with one country in particular—namely, Saudi.

We continue to sell arms to Saudi and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, pointed out, some of those weapons may be used in the ongoing war in Yemen. I believe that is what she said, and it is certainly one of the issues in the report. It would be possible to impose sanctions on Saudi and thereby reduce arms sales to it. Will the Minister reflect on that? Will the Government consider whether they would be willing to reduce arms sales? As my noble friend Lord Purvis made clear in his excellent contribution, there is a danger when we are thinking about international relations and our role in the Middle East, that, in looking for opportunities arising from Brexit, we focus on bilateral trade, some of which concerns the arms trade. Some of those opportunities may be about delivering security, and there may be good reasons for selling arms. However, they may just be about commercial interest. As my noble friend Lord Purvis suggested, sometimes economic interest seems to trump the issues of politics, culture and, I suggest, human rights.

Therefore, I conclude by asking the Minister what work Her Majesty’s Government are doing to take seriously questions of human rights, because at the moment, as my noble friend Lord Alderdice suggested, the answers to the committee’s report do little more than rehearse certain platitudes.